The Neuromancer video game stole many, many hours of my life back in my Commodore 128 days. Still a better game than 90% of what EA poops out every year.

wiredroach: Tachikoma: I never really liked Neuromancer. It just read as a pathetic attempt to copy Phillip K. Dick or Asimov. Now 'Caves of Steel' or 'Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?', those are some great books.

Huh? Gibson may have borrowed from a lot of places, but I don't think he ever borrowed anything from Asimov; no one can do wooden characters and bland, unevocative prose like Asimov could.

I take it you didn't like the Multi Vac story lines, the concept of R Daneel Olivaw, or even concept of the world ending? (Nightfall short story, not the book!)

/Asimov was more challenging that Bradbury, but he also challenged the reader more
//the times I wept over the Multi Vac stories as a child...

GameVoid: The Neuromancer video game stole many, many hours of my life back in my Commodore 128 days. Still a better game than 90% of what EA poops out every year.

That's because EA sucks hard these days. Gone are the Archon/Mail Order Monsters/M.U.L.E./Racing Destruction Set days.

And Neuromancer was a good book...re-read it a few months ago. Then I re-read Richard K Morgan's series. Takeshi Kovacs is my homeboy.

Tachikoma: wiredroach: Tachikoma: I never really liked Neuromancer. It just read as a pathetic attempt to copy Phillip K. Dick or Asimov. Now 'Caves of Steel' or 'Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?', those are some great books.

Huh? Gibson may have borrowed from a lot of places, but I don't think he ever borrowed anything from Asimov; no one can do wooden characters and bland, unevocative prose like Asimov could.

I take it you didn't like the Multi Vac story lines, the concept of R Daneel Olivaw, or even concept of the world ending? (Nightfall short story, not the book!)

/Asimov was more challenging that Bradbury, but he also challenged the reader more
//the times I wept over the Multi Vac stories as a child...

I like Asimov and his stuff is great fun to read...but there's no way he's more challenging than Bradbury. Asimov's characters are one-dimensional and his prose style is like reading a cookbook. The man can entertain, though.

Man On Fire: ZAZ: Gibson never did anything for me. Heresy, perhaps, but I just never got into him. Shockwave Rider, proto-cyberpunk a decade before the genre existed, that was good. When Gravity Fails, that was good. But I don't worship the canon of the genre.

it's very Noir, in my opinion. I know a lot of people who didn't like it, and to the man/woman they don't like noir.

/When Gravity Fails was ok. Vurt was farking weird (literally). Altered Carbon was fantastic.

I was just thinking about Vurt the other day and how messed up it was. I had weird dreams about it for about a couple weeks after reading.

Favourite Gibson book is Virtual Light. CountZero I like mainly because I have fond memories of reading it on the SkyTrain in Vancouver.

Difference Engine, anyone?

DjangoStonereaver: NEUROMANCER is, itself, a great book, even if its reputation as
groundbreaking is more marketing hype than truth.

Unfortunately, it was so good that its reputation is unutterably
sullied by the slew of substandard imitators it spawned.

But, William Gibson has never equalled it.


Actually, I place Gibson with Tolkien. That's not a compliment though. Both, while not the trailblazers of their genres, did bring them to prominence. However, later authors would create works that were just simply better. They may have been good for their time, but put them side by side with more modern works, and they start to show their age.

redsquid: Oh yeah- I just realized the DTV switch means the death of video static! Will someone broadcast a channel of fuzz so us old farts will feel more comfortable?

Video static started dying a long time before that.

It all started when people decided the TV should know more than the viewer, and any channel that it deems has insufficient signal will be blued-out.

Carry that far enough and all television ends up blue.

Axias: Unforgettable opening sentence.. Really set the tone for the whole genre.. I think I read this book 10x as a youngster..
/not the subby

Sadly, Modern readers will assume he meant the sky was a deep beautiful Cerulean Blue, rather than the dingy gray he intended

metallion: I read Hard-Wired, by Walte Jon Williams, before I ever read anything by Gibson. After that, Neuromancer was sort of meh...

Plus eleventy.

Neuromancer got me excited because it was the Genesis Book of a large swath of books I'd been reading, as well as a lot of online memes from the late 80's and early 90's that I never quite "got".

Hard Wired, on the other hand, is an ACTION book, with cyberpunk thrown in.

"He would run the Line, and they would not, and he pitied them for what they did not know."

bhcompy: TheGreatZarquon: Between Neuromancer ,never-ending games of Shadowrun and a room full of computers, what else was there to life in the 80's and early 90's?

Cocaine and hair products.

And Cyberpunk-inspired LARPS (And hanging out with the hawt goth girls who all took the the "sex addict" disability for their characters)

also the Nueromancer game for the C-64 was the greatest, most complex video game of its generation.

Magorn: Sadly, Modern readers will assume he meant the sky was a deep beautiful Cerulean Blue, rather than the dingy gray he intended

Unless they've been in the Northeast the past couple of weeks...

I reread it recently, as I usually do every three years or so. I am actually surprised that Neuromancer doesn't feel more dated than it does. If you change some of the numbers (8 *megabytes* of hot RAM in the Hitachi, for example) things still flow pretty well. We don't have a space "archipelago" like he posited. And the Sprawl universe emerged from a Cold War endgame that resulted in a minor nuclear exchange between the US and USSR and the rise of Japan as the world economic hegemon, so you could position it as an alternative future, if you liked.

One cyberpunk book that I'm surprised isn't referred to more often is Sterling's Schimatrix, which I found to be a really excellent arc of future history storytelling. Sterling can hit or he can miss, but I thought he rocked it out of the park with that one.

jhva3: DashFieldpaint: Neuromancer: great novel, classic novel. It's a better novel than Snowcrash. That being said, Snowcrash would make a better movie.

Snowcrash even reads like a movie. Neuromancer reads like... a novel.

Neuromancer was great. Snow Crash was entertaining, and would make a great movie, but the prose made me cringe. I don't know if it is just me, but Stephenson seems to have a really tin ear, and can't turn a phrase to save his life.

that's why I like the book. the phrases he uses are clunky and tongue-in-cheek.Mister Peejay: metallion: I read Hard-Wired, by Walte Jon Williams, before I ever read anything by Gibson. After that, Neuromancer was sort of meh...

Plus eleventy.

Neuromancer got me excited because it was the Genesis Book of a large swath of books I'd been reading, as well as a lot of online memes from the late 80's and early 90's that I never quite "got".

Hard Wired, on the other hand, is an ACTION book, with cyberpunk thrown in.

"He would run the Line, and they would not, and he pitied them for what they did not know."


hardwired is indeed the superior in terms of writing, plot, and technical stuff, but Neuromancer came first, and that's what counts most of the time.

If William Gibson were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave over how the Net and Anonymous responded to this Iran Election thing - which is just as the Man wanted you to. Tools.

Man On Fire: that's why I like the book. the phrases he uses are clunky and tongue-in-cheek.

Wait so you're saying he's doing that on purpose? Did that just go over my head?

Cantih: Actually, I place Gibson with Tolkien. That's not a compliment though. Both, while not the trailblazers of their genres, did bring them to prominence. However, later authors would create works that were just simply better. They may have been good for their time, but put them side by side with more modern works, and they start to show their age.

Tolkein lacks the character dynamics of modern authors, not necessarily "age". Someone like Steven Erikson could be comparable to what you say for fantasy, large scope and excellent dialogue.

Gibson has better character dynamics than Tolkein, but his strong points are still world building and descriptiveness. Most of the modern scifi I've seen still doesn't compare(haven't read Richard Morgan yet), but unlike fantasy, the best scifi that exists is still written by Grandmasters like Farmer and Heinlein. Gibson might represent his subgenre, but he doesn't represent his whole genre like Tolkein does/did, and I don't think anyone has ever claimed he's as good as those I mentioned already or others in this thread like Bradbury and Asimov.

TheGreatZarquon: Between Neuromancer ,never-ending games of Shadowrun and a room full of computers, what else was there to life in the 80's and early 90's?

Games of Cyberpunk, perhaps? My Eclipse full body borg ninjas up and slices your Troll Street Sam into sushi.

Sign me up for the Neuromancer love as well. Really innovative book that a lot of people now take for granted. 'Cyberspace? You mean the Internet?'

There'll probably be a movie one day, although I still have PTS over Johnny Mnemonic. More than likely, the movie adaptation will suck because there's not nearly enough action to carry a film version to make it seem profitable in the eyes of Hollywood, so they'll try to 'jazz it up', or some other shiate.

HardWired would make a much easier transition to the big screen and still retain it's core. A lot more action there.

jhva3: Man On Fire: that's why I like the book. the phrases he uses are clunky and tongue-in-cheek.

Wait so you're saying he's doing that on purpose? Did that just go over my head?

I don't know if he did it on purpose. maybe it was just a happy accident, all I know is that Cryptonomicon didn't have that problem.

Gibson's early work created a world rather than a genre; he populated it with the classic ideas of film noir and a liberal dose of pretty accurate future-telling. It's dated now for sure, but the prescience involved was staggering for a man who was a self-professed technophobe.

If you guys haven't read the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties) yet, do so. Its prose is a bit more current, with elements that make more sense as a future we can see. The current set of books (two so far) are works set in contemporary times, but their worlds are shifted just a step or two ahead of ours. Gibson's work isn't perfect, but he deserves credit for almost single-handedly saving sci-fi novels after the genre had moved on to movies and TV.

I'll never forget the sense of wonder and adventure I felt when reading that first line in Neuromancer- it was a stormy evening in Middle-of-Nowhere, Ohio, and in that moment I was in that world. I never left. Thsnk you, Mr. Gibson.

bhcompy: the best scifi that exists is still written by Grandmasters like Farmer and Heinlein.

Errrrrrrmm. Well. I have to lay town my two cents on this statement. Farmer when good is well-nigh incomprehensible, and when bad is soul-searingly bad. He's a Grandmaster because everyone agrees that he is and no one bothers to read him. (I would say that the same thing provisionally applies to Gene Wolfe, except The Book of the New Sun is actually a work that is worth the effort to understand. I've never been as impressed with the rest of his stuff, though.)

Heinlein, like his fellow future historian Niven, has not aged well. The only Heinlein book that holds up to re-reading thus far in my experience is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. There's a successful sheen of otherworldliness in TMIAHM that manages to cover up the go-go boots and beehives of what is a very white-bread, middle-Sixties sensibility. The rest of it, not so much. I can read Niven for the weird technology. I can't read Heinlein without acknowledging that he wrote sci-fi that could have been published in the Saturday Evening Post--which is not, in 2009, a compliment.

Just my opinion, I don't want to get any flamewars started. But, if you must, you must.

theorellior: One cyberpunk book that I'm surprised isn't referred to more often is Sterling's Schimatrix, which I found to be a really excellent arc of future history storytelling. Sterling can hit or he can miss, but I thought he rocked it out of the park with that one.

That is easily one of my favorite books of all time, because it shows very clearly how evolution/speciation is happening in H. sapiens right now. The idea of species being derived from ideology is really interesting. No other "future" sci-fi that I've seen has given me such a feeling of "well obviously it's going to happen like that! how did I not see it before?!"

/"Rainbows End" by Vinge was a close second in terms of accuracy-of-vision, I suspect

albo: mavrickatubc: I loved the whole Sprawl series, but haven't really found other cyberpunk books I loved, with the exception of Snow Crash.

wilhemena baird's "crashcourse" is a 90s one-off that's worthy

Actually, Baird wrote several sequels to Crashcourse (Clipjoint, Psykosis, and Chaos Come Again), all of which are pretty good.

I picked up Crashcourse after an add in a magazine from Gibson lauding it. Loved it. Stole the plot for a Shadowrun game too.

The last one is incredibly bizarre but I loved it.

She appears to have disappeared off the face of the earth though. The last book published in 1997.

RemyDuron: It's an awesome book, but I've always thought it got a little too much credit in founding the genre.

I mean, it may have established most of the cliches others followed, but I always thought Philip K. Dick wrote some things pretty damn close to cyberpunk. A

That is certainly true, but Gibson, I think, represented the first true break from the modernism of the golden-age sci-fi era. PKD books still had people zooming around the cosmos in spaceships.

Anyway:

He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.

Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline ... And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.

Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the hoverport and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white loafers and clingwrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a child.

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.

My favorite novel by my favorite novelist. He has quite the way with words.

I agree with whoever said that Richard K. Morgan's 'Altered Carbon' and sequels were farking awesome.

TheGreatZarquon

Between Neuromancer ,never-ending games of Shadowrun and a room full of computers, what else was there to life in the 80's and early 90's?


Korvyov

Hilarity in "Paranoia", ridiculous min-maxing in Palladium games and GURPs, brutal critical hits in MERPs, Triscuits and Billy Joel?

Calculating THAC0, memorizing the Sanity tables for Call of Cthulhu, still playing Wasteland and AD&D: Eye of The Beholder then figuring out why in the HELL my second 5 1/4" drive went out on my Tandy 1000.

/All before 10 - the rest of the kids got NES systems. I had a PC until 1991. Then I got a Master System for my birthday with Shinobi and After Burner. Got Phantasy Star a few months after that.

Also; best JRPG ever! Sadly it was so hard you figured they OWED you a nude shot of Alis. So hard... Oh! And get graph paper before playing or you will die inside of an hour and a half.

Others insert tiny chips called "microsofts" (no relation to Bill Gates's company) into slots behind their ears. Microsofts form a direct neural link with the brain and can deliver anything from raw data to games to various forms of entertainment (such as "simstim," described below).

Here's Gibson introducing the idea of microsofts in chapter 4: "Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young [...]. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear [...]. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of Microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear." Another character in Neuromancer, an art dealer, leaves seven microsofts inserted behind his ear to make him a walking encyclopedia of art history.

// now i understand, Young Billy dreamed of having 7 microsofts behind his ears.

Today's young Billy dreams of 7 Boxxys, behind his bed

Has anyone seen the LED billboards that are going up all over, even on the sides of buses, and had a little flashback to reading Neuromancer?

pdkl95: Quantum Apostrophe: Language will never evolve to the point where IT IS is a possessive pronoun though.

Ouch. I normally get that one right. I must need more caffeine or something.

/you're still an annoying grammar-nazi

I know. I take pride in it.
/BTW I have an autographed copy of Neuromancer

Vernor Vinge, biatches.

pdkl95: h2ogate: albo 2009-07-02 01:47:07 PM

"You mean the sky was blue?"

In 1984, most TVs showed static noise on an unused channel. (See Poltergeist). Computerized TVs that put up a plain blue screen when no signal was detected didn't come along until the mid to late '90s.

This is an amazing example of how language evolves. It was such a good metaphor to open the book with, and it's meaning has flipped 180-degrees ever sense the invention of the "blue screen" for channels with no signal.

It's rare you see the meaning of a simple sentence change to it's exact opposite meaning in such a short period of time.

RemyDuron: And William Burroughs came close himself

This is probably not a coincidence, given how freely Gibson admits to copying a lot of his style from Burroughs.

Really? That's cool. I'm usually terrible at noticing influences like that. And I've always heard Burroughs referred to as a beatnik author, and he was, but I almost never hear to him referred to as a science fiction author. And I thought it was blindingly obvious he inspired some of Dick's writings, although possibly it was just both of them writing things based of experiences with seriously abusing drugs. I always saw him as being linked to cyberpunk through Dick, didn't know he directly inspired Gibson.

Cool.

I really wish Burroughs wrote more in the style of Naked Lunch. I read Queer, and that was good, but not Naked Lunch good. And I tried reading his cut up trilogy, and it was just incoherent to be entertaining. Naked Lunch was kind of incoherent, but it had generally discrete chunks of coherent happenings which followed each other nonsensically, occasionally sharing characters, locations, etc. The cut up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) just seem completely nonsensical. And interesting piece of literature, but not very entertaining as recreational reading.

Samwise Gamgee: That is certainly true, but Gibson, I think, represented the first true break from the modernism of the golden-age sci-fi era. PKD books still had people zooming around the cosmos in spaceships.

Sometimes he did, but some of his novels and stories did not. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had spaceships, but they really didn't play a role in the story. Through a Scanner Darkly didn't have space ships. Some of his short stories don't.

And a lot of Neuromancer takes place on a space station.

Though I know what you mean, Neuromancer was more down to Earth and gritty than a lot of PKD's stuff, but not that much moreso IMO.

Much as I loved Neuromancer, I must admit Gibson benefited from timing as well. I'm not sure Neuromancer would have had the impact had it not been published at the point at which computers were becoming household appliances. It made it easier for the reader to accept and immerse themselves in a world that looked to be a direct extrapolation of the changes occurring in their own lives. Many of the elements and themes that Gibson used in Neuromancer can be found in the works of New Wave Sci-fi of the late sixties - Delany immediately comes to mind - but I suspect the utter alienness of those features prevented them from becoming the universally accepted precepts of a new "genre".

And whoever was trumpeting the current output of the Grandmasters as being the best (hard) sci-fi today probably needs to be introduced to authors like Vinge or Alastair Reynolds. There's much more depth in their works than were ever in say, Asimov's efforts.

The Dixie Flatline approves.

ICE, ICE, baby ...

Gibson once sat a booksigning at which a group of pretty tough looking dudes moved to the table after waiting in line. They took one look at Gibson (who is the least cyberpunk looking fellow you might imagine) and walked away in disgust.

/loved the book

Just read Neuromancer for the first time two months ago. Loved it. Quoted pieces to my wife. Had to make sure I never mentioned other parts to her.

Don't know or care about the time it was made. Incredible novel, Faulknerian in scope and execution. Timeless.

Let us not bullshiat here, some books are great.

AspectRatio: Neuromancer was great.
Too bad it inspired so many shiatty novelists.

I'm assuming that is Neal Steph-something.

"Lol Hiro Protagonist is a great name! I'm breaking the 4th wall IN A BOOK!"

Me: "I never knew you could read ejaculate..."

And this is in the 'Video' section of FARK because.... ?

Ashelth: AspectRatio: Neuromancer was great.
Too bad it inspired so many shiatty novelists.

I'm assuming that is Neal Steph-something.

"Lol Hiro Protagonist is a great name! I'm breaking the 4th wall IN A BOOK!"

Me: "I never knew you could read ejaculate..."

. . .

You are missing out. Neuromancer is good because it was groundbreaking, but honestly I think Snow Crash is a more entertaining novel. But parody/homage is one of my favorite things ever.

I mean, hell, how can you hate a novel with this paragraph:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfarker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfarker in the world. The position is taken.

Like many, I thought Gibson wrote with a black ono-sendai workstation with the serial numbers filed off. He used a typewriter.

Now we all have laptops we could not have wished for when the book came out. Neato.

KarmicRetribution: And whoever was trumpeting the current output of the Grandmasters as being the best (hard) sci-fi today probably needs to be introduced to authors like Vinge or Alastair Reynolds. There's much more depth in their works than were ever in say, Asimov's efforts.

There's much more length in their works. For every Stand on Zanzibar or Stranger in a Strange Land (to pick two long 1960s novels) there were a dozen or more 144-160 page paperbacks. Back another decade, Foundation was a series of novellas. Fix-up novels were common due to the importance of magazine publication.

In size, Reynolds' novellas are a better comparison to some of the classics. Foundation -- or its constituent stories -- beats "Diamond Dogs."

albo: Axias: Unforgettable opening sentence

which future generations will never understand.

"You mean the sky was blue?"

For all you kids out there, here's somwewhat what the sky looked like:

theorellior:
the Sprawl universe emerged from a Cold War endgame that resulted in a minor nuclear exchange between the US and USSR and the rise of Japan as the world economic hegemon, so you could position it as an alternative future, if you liked.

That actually makes a lot of sense... I always liked that the Soviets were still around in Neuromancer (probably because I LOVE another one of Gibson's works, the short story Red Star, Winter Orbit).

GameVoid: The Neuromancer video game stole many, many hours of my life back in my Commodore 128 days. Still a better game than 90% of what EA poops out every year.

I wasted countless hours on Neuromancer and Wasteland on my C128. I kept the computer for years just to be able to replay them. I'd love to see a modern remake of Neuromancer. But only if it perserved the original Devo soundtrack =)

AspectRatio: Neuromancer was great.
Too bad it inspired so many shiatty novelists.

(pic of Cory Doctorow)

This, this, this, this, this a million times. Little Brother is the only book I've ever read where I literally thought, "THIS got published? People, including Neil Gaiman, read and even praised it? I'm in the wrong business."

Galaxy of Prawns: People, including Neil Gaiman, read and even praised it?

Actually, I made the exact inverse of that statement after reading American Gods. "People read and even praise Neil Gaiman?"

You are missing out. Neuromancer is good because it was groundbreaking, but honestly I think Snow Crash is a more entertaining novel. But parody/homage is one of my favorite things ever.

I've only been reading Snow Crash for the last week or so (I'm on chapter 15, I think,) and I love how the novel is definitely not supposed to be taken seriously. It's not like Hiro Protaganist is most likely the guy's real name either. Most of the people in the book use pseudonyms so I figure Hiro does as well (if even just his last name.)

RoyFokker'sGhost: ..., so they'll try to 'jazz it up', or some other shiate.


MULTIBALL! MULTIBALLLL!!!!

RemyDuron: I mean, hell, how can you hate a novel with this paragraph:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfarker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfarker in the world. The position is taken.

I don't "hate" Snow Crash, but that passage (like the rest of the book) sounds like it was written for pre-teen males, if it weren't for the F word.

farmerdrizzt: Just read Neuromancer for the first time two months ago. Loved it. Quoted pieces to my wife. Had to make sure I never mentioned other parts to her.

Don't know or care about the time it was made. Incredible novel, Faulknerian in scope and execution. Timeless.

Let us not bullshiat here, some books are great.

Time to move on to the sequels/his other works. Read them in order.